And sometimes it feels like nothing has changed until we catch ourselves doing something ordinary without dread, or without hours of thinking about the need to do it.

Dolly Parton’s “Light of a Clear Blue Morning” doesn’t rush. It doesn’t shout. It breathes.

She wrote it in 1974 as she was driving away after the meeting where she ended her professional and creative partnership with Porter Wagoner—a move that would cost her stability but preserve her soul. You can hear it in the lyrics: this is not a song written from the mountaintop. It’s written from the aching just before. From the still-throbbing ribcage of someone who finally said, “Enough.”

And somewhere between the breath she took and the piano chord that opens the song, you can feel it—hope—landing, ever so quietly.

There’s something neurobiologically accurate about that moment. In trauma and chronic stress, the brain’s amygdala (our alarm system) goes into overdrive. The body gets caught in threat loops—hypervigilance, freeze, shutdown, over-accommodation.

But when healing begins, even imperceptibly, we notice subtle shifts: our parasympathetic system (the "rest and digest" part of our autonomic nervous system) finally gets a seat at the table again. We breathe a little deeper. We digest food a little easier.

We might even catch ourselves singing in the car or shower, without realizing that the voice in us had gone quiet for months.

Dolly doesn’t give us a happy ending in this song; she gives us a crack in the clouds.

Everything that’s gone is gonna be all right

She sings it not with certainty, but like it’s a liturgy and repeating it will one day make it true. The line is pure cognitive reappraisal, a skill we now teach in therapy to help people shift the story they tell themselves.

Not to lie.

Not to sugarcoat.

But to narrate differently.

To say: I thought I was buried, but maybe I’m being planted.

To say: I’m not broken—I’m in repair.

And then she gets to the chorus.

It’s gonna be okay. It’s gonna be okay. It’s gonna be okay.

Think about the mirror neurons in our brains, the ones that fire when we watch someone else experience something and it registers as if it were happening to us. These neurons are part of what makes co-regulation possible. They help explain why hearing Dolly sing “it’s gonna’ be okay” in that mountain-born vibrato can sometimes feel more healing than a whole therapy session.

There’s another line worth coming back to, of course:

It’s been a long hard fight,

but I see a brand new day dawning.

That’s really what recovery actually looks like. The slow and steady act of beginning again. Not in the sparkle of big declarations, but in the thousand invisible choices we make to stay soft. To stay open. To keep hoping with a soft front and a strong back.

Even when it’s been dark so long we forgot what our own faces look like in daylight. Even when we risk our entire future musical career by leaving Porter Wagoner who gave us our musical start because we know that the future requires us to move in a new direction.

When you listen to “Light of a Clear Blue Morning,” you don’t usually feel inspired to do something dramatic. Instead, you likely feel inspired to keep doing the quiet things: texting back a friend. Drinking water. Saying no when you mean no. Looking up. Trusting the road. Not because everything is fine, but because we trust the morning always comes.

And somehow, in the process, the light finds us.